Fourth Sunday of Advent- Year B: December 24, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Fourth Sunday of Advent- Sunday, December 24,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Roy preaching

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

"Even at Christmas, when haloes are pretested by focus groups for inclusion in mass market campaigns, they are hard to see. Annie Dillard was scrutinizing the forest floor at Pilgrim’s Creek when she looked up and saw a tree haloed in light. She had caught the tree at prayer, in a moment so receptive and full, the boundaries of bark burst and its inner fire became available for awe. But seeing haloes is more than a lucky sighting. It entails the advent skill of sustaining attention, the simple act, as Dillard found out, of looking up. The optometrist swings his goggle machine before our eyes. ‘Read line four.’ Then he flips lenses through the machine until the blurred letters of line four snap into focus. But if we break our captivity to the imprisoning print of line four and look up to line one, the letter E will carry us away with its clarity and bless the smallest of markings with surrounding light. That is how haloes are seen, by looking up into largeness, by tucking smallness into the folds of infinity. I do not know this by contemplating shimmering trees. Rather there was woman, amid the crowd of Christmas, busy at Christmas table, and I looked up to catch a rim of radiance etching her face, to notice curves of light sliding along her shape. She out-glowed the candles. All the noise of the room left my ears and silence sharpened my sight. When this happens, and I recognize the visits, I do not get overly excited. I merely allow love to be renewed, for that is the mission of haloes, the reason they are given to us. Nor do I try to freeze the frame. Haloes suffer time, even as they show us what is beyond time. But when haloes fade, they do not abruptly vanish, abandoning us to the sorrow of lesser light. They recede, as Gabriel departed Mary, leaving us pregnant.”----- Seeing Haloes: by John Shea

And according to what’s given to us this morning, Christmas is also about God’s preferred mode of moving among us, about the sort of real estate God particularly fancies. In fairness, it must be admitted that the Bible presents two stories about this real estate as if God were of two minds about it. ‘The House of Cedar School,’ as it might be called, receives its first fulfillment in the epic construction of Solomon’s Temple, an edifice congruent with the regal splendor of everything else about Solomon. Its successor, a pale imitation of the first, seems an essential symbol of the return of the exiles from Babylonian captivity. From Solomon on, the so-called ‘Tent School’ of Temple construction seems unworthy of consideration, but it persists in the tradition.

It begins with King David proposing to his court prophet that it’s ridiculous for the king to be living in a house of cedar while the ark of God stays in a tent, but although the prophet immediately encourages the king’s intentions for courtesy’s sake, on second thought he emphasizes God’s preference of a tent despite David’s desire to provide a more permanent structure. What’s going on here is the prophetic reminder of the tabernacle dwelling of the holy presence, which became institutionalized in Israel’s life as the yearly Feast of Tabernacles so that, by camping out for a week, the people would not forget where they came from, a memory whose importance your therapist will emphasize.

God’s assurance to David is twofold: in the words of the prophet, “the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house” and “(one of your descendants) shall build a house for my name”; nowhere is the building material specified, and, in fact, the language here is all about the establishment of dynasty. Otherwise, the only building hint given is that a tent is God’s preferred venue, but will it be duplex, split level, or ranch; you also have Victorian, Georgian,  Federal, and Desert Revival. Then there are the commissions Joseph executed with the help of Jesus, with a large menu of possibilities. Imagine the conversations: “Son, I realize we were occupiers, but don’t you think that Philistine split-level is just the coolest?” It’s an important question for the annual Feast of Tabernacles as important as Passover for the Jewish sense of identity. Oddly enough, the preferred design is Tel Aviv Ikea, using rather inexpensive materials, which is why they came to Joseph’s shop in the first place: four two by fours, about eight feet long, (for the upright corners), four two by twos, same length, (for the roof), for the roof covering, several slats capable of supporting light tree branches. For the sides, they discovered that old bedsheets work well, and for the front, a bedsheet attached to a wire track. Leafy tree branches are placed on the roof slats, with enough gaps to observe the night stars and Ikea recommends a seven-foot cube for the construction, allowing plenty of room for guests.

All this would help Jesus remember the saying that “While God waits for the temple to be built of love, people bring stones” and reinforce the later realization of John the Evangelist that Christmas is about how God moves among us in a tent. And not only how, but why this should be preferable to the host of tourist attractions erected to supposedly house the divine presence. Why, indeed, should the Feast of Tabernacles, a kind of camp-town meeting, be so important to Israel and why should John the Evangelist make such a point that the Word became flesh and tented among us? What is this thing with tents? Something to do with the mystery of wilderness? Wilderness, and its effect upon us — which eases the hatreds, the violence, all those hard forbidden thoughts that plague us, ease them as wild things always ease heartache. Wilderness in which the undomesticated God reunites with us, and if you recall your childhood camping adventures, you might recall your tent as a mysterious vehicle for this. The undomesticated God prefers a tent of bedsheets to a house of cedar, and when the Word became flesh, Jesus preferred the tent of suffering humanity in which to move about, the Body of Christ as described by John Shea in his Prayer to the God Who Fell from Heaven.

“If you had stayed tight-fisted in the sky and watched us thrash with all the patience of a pipe smoker, I would have prayed like a golden bullet aimed at your heart. But the story says you cried, and so heavy was the tear you fell with it to earth where like a baritone in a bar it is never time to go home. So you move among us, twisting every straight line into Picasso, stealing kisses from pinched lips, holding our hand in the dark. So now when I pray I sit and turn my mind like a television knob till you are there with your large, open hands, spreading my life before me like a Sunday tablecloth and pulling up a chair yourself. For by now the secret is out. You are home.”